


Through a Glass, Lightly

by paprikaflakes



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Ableism, Alternate Universe - Alignment Changes, Arkham Asylum Staff are Bad Doctors, Being a hero on Earth-3 is peak tragicomedy, Earth-3, F/F, F/M, Ignoring and reworking canon just for funsies, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Torture, Institutional Abuse, M/M, More characters will make an appearance, One Shot Collection, Open Relationships, Poly Undertones, Team Bonding, Team as Family, The type of people who would willingly fight an evil version of Batman, and giving it depth and characterization, are crazy in the best of ways, earth 3 but its less depressing and more fun and weird, taking the gimmickverse where bad is good and good is bad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:46:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25477132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paprikaflakes/pseuds/paprikaflakes
Summary: They're weird, dysfunctional and probably doomed, but they're going to go out with a bang before the curtain call. They sure as hell aren't the heroes anyone asked for, but they're all Gotham's got.A series of Earth-3 vignettes.
Relationships: Edward Nygma/Harleen Quinzel, Jokester/Edward Nygma, Jokester/Harleen Quinzel, Jokester/Harleen Quinzel/Edward Nygma, Jonathan Crane/Edward Nygma, Jonathan Crane/Jervis Tetch, Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	1. Chilly

"So, d'ya think the Clownfetti gun is worth the hassle of fixin' up again? It's real big an' bulky and I know it's got all those little parts you hate, but it's been workin' like a charm! And the look on Owlman's stupid mug when he got a load of 'fetti to the face was priceless! Shoulda been there, Eddie!"

Harleen battered her eyelashes at him, and a fleck of clumpy mascara flitted down onto her cheek. Edward found himself wanting to brush it off with his finger. He gulped. Harleen grinned wolfishly at him and sat down and crossed her legs on the work bench. He hoped she wasn't too cold down in the basement. He certainly was, even wearing several layers and his favorite green beanie. Maybe she just didn't care? Because she was wearing an oversized hoodie, which he was almost certain was borrowed from Jokester, it had that grease stain that was shaped like Florida. He wondered if she wasn't wearing bottoms at all, her legs were completely uncovered, which would have been even more chilly and-

He told himself very firmly to not look at her like a slavering degenerate again. Harleen Quinzel was a happily taken woman, he reminded himself. He pulled his attention to the broken confetti cannon lying dissembled on the table.

The prognosis was not good. When he had been moving it around earlier, it had made some very ominous rattling noises, not to mention the collapsed side reinforcement and busted trigger mechanism. What had even happened here? Did they toss it in front of a bus, or use it to hit a boulder? The way that Jokester and the Harlequin tended to treat his creations made him wonder. Them throwing stuff just for the hell of it wasn't out of character in the slightest. But he needed to know, because he hated unanswered questions, even ones about mundane minutiae. 

He contemplated. Naturally, things broke in the line of duty, but at this point it was just getting silly. His engineering skills were excellent, as expected of someone of his caliber, but if only the two clowns could learn to be a bit less _carefree_ and a bit more _careful._ They'd be able to eat things besides box pasta and maybe find a nicer base of operations if the budget for repairs went down. Squatting in an abandoned house had its perks, but no heat in the dead of winter and possible lead poisoning were major downsides. 

He let out a long, exaggerated sigh.

"Riddle me this, Harleen. What's the only thing that's more useful when it's broken? The answer is _an egg_. How many times have the two of you broken equipment? We're not made of solder, you know. And how did it even get this broken in the first place?"

"Aw, Eddie, y'know how it is, when me an' Mistah J are out there punch-punchin' the baddies, it gets _real_ hectic," she said, gesticulating punches and dodges, her hoodie sleeves flailing. She suddenly looked thoughtful and tapped her chin.

"An' it got all busted because Owlman grabbed it and chucked it off Wayne Tower, the dick. So it wasn't our fault that time! Honest," Harleen explained, looking sheepish as she rubbed the back of her neck. 

Edward paused. They had lost it and got it back? 

"Wait, you went back for it?" 

Harleen let out a laugh and clapped her hands together. 

"'Course we did, silly! It was Jokester's idea. You get all-" She mimed some shaking motions with her fists, "twitchy when somebody loses stuff you make and he wants you to relax more. 'Sides, it was fun, kinda like a big scavenger hunt. We checked a buncha dumpsters too. Didja know there are a ton of good dumpsters to dumpster dive in downtown? Really shoulda come with, Eddie!" 

She let out a little giggle. 

They did all that for him? Edward mentally calculated wind trajectory, and the density of the area surrounding Wayne Tower.

He swallowed uncomfortably. He wasn't used to people going out of their way for him, or really, if he had to be honest, doing gestures like that. He even felt a little guilty for being snippy, which was both foreign and uncomfortable. 

"Thank you. That must have taken a while."

Was that the right thing to say? He was so bad at this, and she would be able to tell and she would be disappointed and-

"No prob, Bob! So...?" 

He pondered. "It is fixable but it might take me a while, even with my considerable talents. You'll need to use something else in the meantime." 

She let out a little cheer. "Thanks a million Eddie! Back to the classics! I'm breakin' out the ol' big hammer gag! Been waitin' for the chance to use that one again!" she exclaimed.

Suddenly, Harleen jumped up and pulled him into a hug. He stiffened for a bit, before relaxing. Harleen was... warm and small and smelled like vanilla body lotion and hairspray and a hint of something burnt and it was all very interesting. 

He mumbled, "I-I, um, Harleen."

"Oh, yeah, right, you gotta work, duh! Toodles!" She waved him off with a cheery finger wiggle and left, sprinting up the stairs and out of the basement.

Edward took a moment to inhale and exhale. He imagined the smile on Harleen's face when he would present her with the fixed Clownfetti gun and resolved to make it harder to break next time. 


	2. Playing Games

There are some parts of Arkham, Jokester thinks, that he’s noticed are inherently funny in and of themselves. One is Nurse Hannity’s wiggle walk when she hands out meds in little paper cups. Of course, Jokester hasn’t been taking the aforementioned meds for weeks, but, well, no one needed to know about the whole weird throat trick he figured out. (Hint, it involved coughing, the inside of his cheek, and other various bodily nastiness.) But, and he means this in the most politically correct way possible, that woman has an tookus the size of a tank and it’s weirdly transfixing, in a non sexual context. 

The other inherently funny thing is people watching in Arkham. Jokester’s been in the old pokey multiple times. And when you’re supposed to be pretending to be drugged into a stupor, you find motivations besides getting an extra pudding cup with lunch. 

Jokester will freely admit to… not having the firmest grasp on reality, (and then he’d say “But I sure can firmly grasp _you_ !” and then grab somebody’s shoulder and squeeze and laugh when they jump a little because physical comedy’s a classic.) But, Christ on a _cracker_ , this place has weird juju, or maybe it’s on one of those ley lines Baron Ghost’s always going on about.

Or maybe it’s the humming fluorescent overhead lights making everyone weirder than usual. One of them has a fly trapped in it. The little guy is buzzing around trying to escape the plastic light fixture and Jokester is rooting for him. He looks around the common room again. A girl in the corner of the room is chewing her nails like a fiend. Her braids are shaking from the effort. If they had an Olympic event for gnawing on your fingers, that chick would win gold. The guy next to her is reading a book called “The Atlantean Prince’s Bride” and it has a muscle hunk holding a swooning woman in a silky dress in front of an underwater castle. It’s the type of trashy book Harleen likes and he misses her terribly for a sharp little moment, before he firmly reminds himself that the sad Pagliacci joke is old and stale. 

He hums in tune with the lights and pulls a card off the top of the deck. 

It’s three in the afternoon, according to the clock on the wall. None of the usual suspects are in, so it’s just him and Maggie Pye playing Uno. He likes Maggie, he decides, even as he sees her pocket a card and slips it into her pants. Stealing important old timey African stuff from rich assholes and leaving replicas behind? And she’d tried to mail the originals to museums in their home countries? That kid was able to use her whole crazy klepto shtick for the forces of good. And, she was pretty decent at Uno, although Eddie could kick his ass at cards and was sorely missed. 

Maggie slaps down a green four, before grinning.

“Mags, m’dear? My little plum? My little honey bunches of oats,” he matches her smirk and leans over the table.

The orderly in the corner starts eyeing them and Jokester makes eye contact with the guy. Burly, crew cut, real hard on for authority type. He has to get this bit of comedic timing down pat and soon. 

He leans in, close to her, and then barks, “You forgot to say ‘Uno!’” And then he slaps his hands on the table and laughs. 

“Jokester! Son of a bitch, you motherfucking got me, ahhh!” 

Maggie lets out this loud and raucous laugh, that doesn’t match her small frame at all, and Jokester is really thinking he’d like to hear more of that when Crew Cut suddenly starts speedwalking over. 

“What’s going on here?” said the orderly, in a tone that reminded Jokester of schoolyard bullies and middle management types. Gross. 

“Isn’t it obvious? We’re playing a card game, ol’ buddy boy! Want me to, uh, deal you in?” 

And then, because he hasn’t been taking his meds, and because he’s bored, and because he’s impulsive and Harleen has always been the one to reel him in and she isn’t there, Jokester makes like he’s inspecting his card (and it’s a Wild Card, oh golly gee!) and he flicks the card at the orderly.

It makes a “thwip!” sound and hits Crew Cut square in the chest. Jokester awards himself Olympic gold for that ten out of ten card flick. 

And then everything goes to hell. He ends up getting pressed into the table and held in a pin.

He squirms and says, “At least buy me dinner first, honey!”

His arm is getting twisted in a very funky way. 

“Could you hold on a bit, I’m not a Stretch Armstrong toy, ow, ow, ow!” 

“Stop talking!” 

He hears someone make a groan of pain and Jokester realizes it came out of his own throat. The little voice in his head says something along the lines of ‘Go limp or they’ll hurt you more, dummy!’ so he goes limp. 

And now there’s more than one orderly here and from the corner of his eye, he can see spilled Uno cards on the floor. Maggie looks horrified, but she moves fast enough across the room to avoid what appears to be a fast track to a booty juice injection. Haloperidol always makes him a bore to be around, he thinks hysterically, so maybe it's for the best the orderlies are dragging him someplace. Like a hook dragging a performer off the stage. 

A lot of things happen after that, most of which he disassociates through. The fluorescent lights in the padded room make his bleach white skin look blue tinged, so he goes through the lyrics to that song about the guy who's blue, da ba dee, da ba daa, in his brain on a loop, and then he thinks about other things that are blue, and that dips into _blue material_ as the comedians used to say, and he’s humming. Things are put over him and into him, and well, that’s lights out. 

It takes a couple days, maybe three-ish or so (he really can’t tell, and they’re keeping him pretty drugged up) of being in solitary before whoever runs this place deigns to let him have some human contact again. He gets trussed up and taken to a small office. Unusually enough, it’s Dr. Crane’s, which he’s never been in. He hasn't really spent a ton of time around Crane, which is a shame, the man makes a pretty good straight man, on account of that sourpuss, poker face thing he’s got going on. 

But, Jokester can see little quirks showing though. He has two little plastic Halloween skulls on his desk, in the middle of June, and he has several abandoned coffee mugs scattered across the room. And the man just looks… not like the chemical vat victim has a place to talk, glass houses and stones and whatever, but Crane gets called “Scarecrow” by the patients for a reason. The guy is _elongated._

Out of all the doctors in Arkham, and there’ve been plenty trying to poke and prod at him, Crane is one of the tolerable ones, probably because Crane isn’t trying to do things like write a book about him, like Harleen was. Which was both flattering and embarrassing, but she meant well by it. In comparison, Crane was maybe a little too interested in trying to figure out if Jokester had any serious phobias they could treat (“It’s my area of expertise,” the doctor explained, which wasn’t reassuring.) But other than that, Dr. Jonathan Crane is, in Jokester’s book, a good egg. 

Jokester clears his throat and it feels raspy. 

“Thanks for coming to get me out of the sleeper jump today, Doc. Much obliged. Padded rooms are _très passé_.”

Crane pauses from his scribbling in that notepad of his. He looks concerned, and Jokester realizes that using vaudeville slang in front of your psychologist could be interpreted as speaking gibberish. 

“Uh, in vaudeville, see, they call the dressing room that’s the farthest from the stage, the ‘sleeper jump’. Because it’s so far you’d have to take an overnight train to get up all those stairs.”

Dr. Crane writes something on his notepad, and his brow is furrowed.

“You said you were in a padded room today?”

“Well, not to startle you or anything, but we are in an asylum. They tend to have those here,” Jokester deadpans. 

“Do you know how long?”

“Uh, I got booty juiced pretty good but I’d say maybe, a weekendish? I went in on Friday. What day is it right now? Wait a minute, why don’t you know this already? Don’t you doctors all get together and kvetch about us crazies? You don’t need a clown when you’ve already got the circus, Crane!” 

Dr. Crane pauses. He puts down the notepad, folds his hands in his lap, and looks Jokester in the eye. 

“It’s Tuesday. I knew about your incident on Friday in the common room, but you weren’t supposed to be in a seclusion room for that long. I got put in charge of your treatment plan recently, and I think that people have been making changes to that without consulting me. Is there anything else that’s happened that I might need to know about?” 

“Hmm... well, they switched from chocolate to vanilla pudding for lunch recently and I think that’s really bumming me out. But aside from what appears to be a screw up on your side, nah, not really a lot.” 

“I want to help you.”

“You can help me by letting me go get breakfast, mayhaps?”

Jokester’s stomach rumbles on cue, and Dr. Crane sighs, opens his desk, and pulls out a granola bar and offers it to him.

“Ooh, are those the crunchy ones? Gimme, gimme, Daddy likey!”

He greedily unwraps the snack and chews it. It’s the most delicious granola bar he’s ever eaten and his opinion of Dr. Crane has gone up exponentially. 

“Personally,” crumbs start to spill out of his mouth, “Sometimes I kinda think Owlman is paying people off to be extra dickish to me when I’m in here, because he’s just the worst and that’s an Owlman kind of thing to do, but I mean, what do I know, amiright? My life’s crazy, Doc. I piss off a supervillain and he gets all obsessed with me. ‘Cause I won’t ask him to prom or something. Is that a dumb theory? It sounds dumb when I just say it out loud like that.”

Crane doesn’t tell him he’s having paranoid delusions, which is refreshing. 

“Go on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well that was kinda upsetting. also, dr. crane is a good doctor in this one. he actually cares. 
> 
> also, why is harley going by harleen? because it's an au, and also because in this universe, her relationship with joker/jokester is actually healthy, so her identity was less subsumed by his. so, her vigilante identity is even more separate from her real name and what she goes by day to day.


End file.
